If you missed all the great speakers on the five city tour of SQL in the City, don’t despair. Many of the same people will be back at SQL in the City in Seattle. It’s scheduled on Monday before the PASS Summit proper starts, so if you’re looking to get your learn on early and you can’t sign up for a pre-con, this is a great, free, opportunity to pick up some additional instruction. Check out the list of speakers. It’s going to be an event worth attending.

I’ve seen the early drafts of the feedback forms from the prior five events. People really seem to enjoy this slightly different approach. In short, Red Gate puts on a heck of a show.

During the five city tour, I was able to do three different presentations, two focused on improving database development processes and one on picking up some of the more obscure monitoring metrics. Based on the feedback, these went over well.

One of the biggest hits is my, for want of a better term, sales pitch for a sandbox development process. From talking to people and reading through the feedback forms, it seems that large majorities are hitting some pretty common issues while attempting to develop databases. DBAs, well intentioned, and right, though we may be, are, to a degree, standing in the way of developers going as fast as they can during development. In this session I spend an hour outlining how I think we, DBAs, can fix that problem. It may sound like a developer focused session, but I’m really hoping to get a room full of DBAs and get them all convinced to be on the side of developers and the development process in order to help deliver more code faster into our production environments, but do it in a safe and secure manner. Developers are welcome as long as they bring everything they learn back to their DBA team. But it all starts at the sandbox. Come to my session and I promise to explain it in full.

And, of course, this is another chance to meet, talk to, interact with, and have some laughs with your #sqlfamily. If you’re in Seattle anyway, stop by, learn something, talk to someone, have a little fun.